China keeps one-child mandate

Tuesday

Sep 28, 2010 at 12:01 AMSep 28, 2010 at 10:46 AM

BEIJING (AP) - China will continue to limit most families to one child in the coming decades, state media said yesterday. The report comes despite concerns about the policy's problematic side effects, such as a rapidly aging population and too few girls, attributed to a preference for boys that leads some to abort female fetuses.

BEIJING (AP) — China will continue to limit most families to one child in the coming decades, state media said yesterday. The report comes despite concerns about the policy’s problematic side effects, such as a rapidly aging population and too few girls, attributed to a preference for boys that leads some to abort female fetuses.

China has the world’s largest population and credits its 30-year-old family-planning limits with preventing 400?million additional births and helping break a traditional preference for large families that had left many people trapped in poverty.

Speculation has been growing about whether the government would relax the policy soon, allowing more people to have two children. A family-planning official in the southern province of Guangdong predicted Saturday that his province would loosen the restrictions by 2015 and possibly scrap the one-child limit by 2030.

But the China Daily newspaper yesterday quoted Li Bin, head of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, as saying there are no plans to change the policy anytime soon. Rules limit urban couples to one child, rural to two.

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